The present invention relates to application development, and more specifically, to a service for monitoring and controlling web services.
Some web services, such as document generation, are computationally intensive. In such cases, it is oftentimes necessary for humans to monitor execution of the services and abort service requests that are taking too long. Monitoring tasks are often implemented by an administrative application that runs on the same server as the web service. In order to service more requests, a pool of application servers may be configured and a load balancer may be used to dispatch requests to available servers. However, this can be problematic for human administrators since the number and Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of the servers are dynamic. For example, servers may be added dynamically in order to meet the demand for processing.
It is therefore infeasible to require a human to access an administrative application on each server. Although sophisticated systems management applications exist, a simple, low-cost, mechanism for administering web services in a load-balanced environment is desirable.